Mizrahi Jews - Religious Rite Designations

Religious Rite Designations

Today, many identify all non-Ashkenasi rite Jews as Sephardic - in modern Hebrew "Sfaradim", mixing ancestral origin and religious rite. This broader definition of "Sephardim" as including all, or most, Mizrahi Jews is also common in Jewish religious circles. During the past century, the Sephardic rite absorbed the unique rite of the Yemenite Jews and lately the Ethiopian Jewish religious leaders in Israel have also joined the Sefardic rite collectivities, especially following rejection of their Jewishness by Ashkenasi and Hassidic circles.

The reason for this classification of all Mizrahim under Sephradic rite is that most Mizrahi communities use much the same religious rituals as Sephardim proper due to historical reasons. The prevalence of the Sephardic rite among Mizrahim is partially a result of Sephardim proper joining some of Miarahi communities following the 1492 expulsion from Sepharad (Spain and Portugal), though deeper historical reasons include the adoption of the Babylonian Talmud by both Mazrahi Jews and Sephradic Jews, as compared with the Jerusalem Talmud among the Ashkenasi (also Hassidic) and to some degree Mustaarbi Jews. Over the last few centuries, the previously distinctive rites of the Mizrahi communities were influenced, superimposed upon or altogether replaced by the rite of the Sephardim, perceived as more prestigious. Even before this assimilation, the original rite of many Jewish Oriental communities was already closer to the Sephardi rite than to the Ashkenazi one. For this reason, "Sephardim" has come to mean not only "Spanish Jews" proper but "Jews of the Spanish rite", adhering the Babylonian Talmud, just as "Ashkenazim" is used for "Jews of the German rite", whose ancestors spoke the Judeo-German, Yiddish language, adhering the Jerusalem Talmud.

Many of the Sephardic Jews exiled from Spain resettled in greater or lesser numbers in many Arabic-speaking countries, such as Syria and Morocco. In Syria, most eventually intermarried with and assimilated into the larger established communities of Arabic-speaking Jews and Mizrahi Jews. In North African countries, by contrast, where the Sephardim came to outnumber the pre-existing Maghrebi Jewish communities it was some of the latter who assimilated into the more prosperous and prestigious Sephardic communities. In Morocco a distinction remained with the purely Sephardic Gerush Castilia of the Spanish-speaking northern strip who kept their Judeo-Spanish language known as Haketia. Either way, this assimilation, combined with the use of the Sephardic rite, led to the popular designation and conflation of most non-Ashkenasi Jewish communities from the Middle East and North Africa as "Sephardic" rite, whether or not they were descended from Spanish Jews, which is what the terms "Sephardic Jews" and "Sepharadim" properly implied when used in the ethnic as opposed to the religious sense.

In many Arab countries, older Arabic-speaking Jewish communities distinguished between themselves and the newer arrivals speaking Judeo-Romance languages, that is, Sephardim expelled from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497. The established Arabic-speaking Jews called themselves Musta'arabim (Arabic for Arabizers), while the newer Sephardi arrivals called them Moriscos (Ladino for Moorish).